Meanwhile, ice losses elsewhere allowed a Russian tanker to make the first ever independent winter crossing of the Arctic

This should not be happening: a dramatic wintertime decline in sea ice in the Bering Sea between Feb. 6-16. Darker blue colors show areas with the lowest sea ice concentrations. One hundred percent ice coverage (and snow as well) is shown in white. Western Alaska is at the bottom, the Aleutians to the left, and Siberia in the upper right. From top to bottom, the scene covers about 600 miles. The animation consists of imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite with an overlay of microwave data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. (Images and sea ice data: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman)

The Bering Sea off Alaska’s west coast has just experienced a shocking loss of ice over a 10-day period — in winter.

See the graph below for the details. To my eye it looks like sea ice extent declined from about 420,000 square kilometers on Feb. 6 to about 260,000 square kilometers on the 16th.

This animation shows how global temperatures in 2017 varied from the long-term average. Click on the image to watch the animation, which shows temperature anomalies in degrees Fahrenheit on a spinning globe. (Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio)

New research suggests that large parts of the world are headed for record-breaking extreme weather events. At the same time, the U.S. intelligence community has broken with President Trump on the threats posed by climate change and other environmental challenges.

Meanwhile, the president is proposing to slash climate science and renewable energy research while boosting investments in oil, gas and coal — the fuels driving global warming.

According to the new research, even if nations manage to meet the temperature target they’ve agreed to in the Paris climate agreement, the planet is likely to see “substantial and widespread increases in the probability of historically unprecedented extreme events.” The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The Paris agreement commits the 174 countries that have signed it to limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels. But according to the study, led by by Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, even with nations’ pledges to reduce greenhouse gases under the agreement, the planet will likely shoot through that goal to warming of 3 degrees C.

“We find that humans have already increased the probability of historically unprecedented hot, warm, wet, and dry extremes, including over 50 to 90% of North America, Europe, and East Asia,” Diffenbaugh and his colleagues concluded.

Even before the study was published, the U.S. intelligence community was signaling its concern about the threats to security posed by climate change.

The conspiracy-minded will shout “chemtrails.” Of course that’s nonsense. But just what is creating these clouds?

The northeast Pacific as seen by NASA’s Terra satellite. (Source: NASA Worldview)

I have to admit that I was a little taken aback when I saw these long, sinuous cloud shapes snaking across the northeast Pacific Ocean.

The image, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite on Feb. 12, 2018, covers a huge amount of territory — as is evident if you look to the extreme right, where a good portion of the west coast of North America is visible.

Before I get into what’s creating these features, let’s get something out of the way immediately: These are not so-called chemtrails — evidence of widespread spraying of chemicals that’s part of a government conspiracy to control our minds or, well, whatever. The chemtrail conspiracy has been soundly debunked, including by a survey of 77 atmospheric and geochemists.

Moving right along… I also quickly dismissed the notion that these were airliner contrails. That’s because these don’t look anything like typical routes between North America and Asia. (Click the thumbnail image at right to see what those routes look like.)

Okay, maybe military aircraft? I don’t think so. That would be a huge number of them covering a vast amount of territory.

Departure from average of the surface and subsurface tropical Pacific sea temperature averaged over five-day periods starting in early January 2018. The vertical axis shows depth below the surface in meters, and the horizontal axis is longitude, from the western to eastern tropical Pacific. This cross-section is right along the equator. (Source: ENSO Blog/Climate.gov figure from Climate Prediction Center data.)

La Niña is still with us and influencing drought and other weather patterns in the United States and elsewhere.

But check out the animation above. That large mass of warm water coursing through the depths of the Pacific Ocean may signal that by this spring, La Nada will be with us.

The warm blob and other signs have prompted the Climate Prediction Center to peg the odds of La Niña fading to neutral conditions at 55 percent during the March through May season. Read More

And what’s happening in the New Arctic is not staying there

Another month, yet another record low for Arctic sea ice extent in a warming world.

January’s average ice extent in the Arctic was 525,000 square miles below the 1981-to-2010 average, making it the lowest January extent in the satellite record. This is an astonishingly large loss of ice — equivalent to 80 percent of Alaska.

But what happened in January was equally, if not more significant, for its timing. It happened when the Arctic was gripped by frigid, polar weather.

Record lows in the Arctic once occurred mostly in September — at the end of summer when relatively warm temperatures naturally cause the frozen lid of sea ice to shrink to an annual minimum extent. With human-caused warming added on top of relatively mild summer temperatures, record melt-backs in summer perhaps are not so surprising.

But now, dramatic reductions in sea ice are occurring more and more often during the cold season.

“Now we are seeing winter really get into the act as well,” says NSIDC director Mark Serreze. “The shrinking Arctic sea ice cover is no longer something that just stands out in summer.”

This shift to record lows in winter, scientists say, is yet another indication that human activities have already transformed the region into what they’re calling “the new Arctic.” Read More

The Sun recently decided to go naked for awhile, as is evident from this image acquired by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

It lost its spots.

The image is from a video posted by NASA showing the Sun going naked from Jan. 26th to Jan. 30th, when a very small, lonely spot finally turns up. In fact, NASA says that with the exception of this one spot, the Sun was naked for almost two weeks.

Spotless periods like this are common as the Sun approaches the low point in its 11-year solar cycle. We’re headed for that minimum next year.

By contrast, during the peak of a solar cycle, the Sun is freckled with many spots. These crackle with intense magnetic activity producing flashes of x-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation that can bathe the Earth. Read More

An animation of satellite images shows just how much thinner the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada range is this year compared to the same time last year. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman)

Thanks especially to warm temperatures, plus a lack of precipitation, the snowpack in most of the Western United States is in bad shape right now — nowhere worse than in California’s Sierra Nevada range.

For all but the northern reaches of the region, snowpack stands at no more than about 50 percent of average, and in many places it’s much worse.

For California, snowpack as of today, Feb. 4, is at just 25 percent of normal.

Luckily, the state’s reservoirs are still brimming with water, thanks to last year’s copious rain and snowfall. This will provide a sizable cushion for the year ahead should warm temperatures and scant precipitation continue.

“There’s still a lot of the winter left,” says Frank Gehrke of California’s Department of Water Resources, quoted by the Sacramento Bee. “Anything can happen as we move through the rest of the season.”

Still, the comparison with last year couldn’t be more stark — as the animation of satellite images above dramatizes. Both images were collected by NASA’s Terra satellite as it passed over the Sierra Nevada range. An image taken on Jan. 29, 2017 shows an extensive blanket of snow, whereas one acquired on Feb. 3rd of this year shows shockingly less.

Check out this image captured Thursday by NASA’s Aqua satellite. See that swirling vortex, complete with a clear eye? It has formed just off the coast of San Clemente Island to the west of San Diego.

Here’s what it looked like to an F-18 fighter pilot flying directly over the feature:

My fighter pilot buddy, boots, took this pic out the window of his F-18 of Von Karman Vorticity creating an eddy off the coast of San Diego Feb 1st. Great shot of a cool phenomenon I’ve just learned a lot about! @NWSSanDiego can’t say I’ve seen this in Iowa before 🤔 pic.twitter.com/9jQGWlmcpa

This is a classic von Kármán vortex, a cyclonic swirl of clouds that can develop when winds are diverted around a big obstacle such an island. The vortices form quite commonly off California as winds interact with coastal topography and the Channel Islands — in this case, San Clemente Island. Read More

As with our planet as a whole, if you want to know the fate of polar bears in a warming world, you need to follow the energy.

For the planet, researchers have been doing just that by keeping track of how carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere have been tipping the climate’s energy balance toward more and more warming. And the high north where polar bears live has warmed faster than any other region on Earth, resulting in shrinking sea ice and a cascade of other environmental impacts.

Among those impacts: pressure on populations of polar bears. These majestic animals use sea ice as a platform from which to hunt their fatty, energy-dense prey: seals. And as the sea ice has shrunk, polar bear populations in some areas have declined.

Now, findings from polar bears equipped with high-tech collar cameras show that the animals are even more vulnerable to warming than previously thought. Read More

North America on Aug. 25, 2017, as seen by the GOES-16 weather satellite. Hurricane Harvey is seen along the Texas Gulf Coast toward the bottom middle of the image. And above the Great Lakes, smoke from wildfires is drifting across a large swath of Canada. (Source: RAMMB/SLIDER)

I’m a bit late to this story, but it’s significant enough that I didn’t want to let it pass by without posting something about it. The long and short of it is this: 2017 truly was a horrific year for weather and climate disasters, both in the United States and the world as a whole.

Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, fires and freezes in the United States claimed at least 362 lives and injured many more in 2017. In total, the nation experienced 16 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion, tying 2011 for most in a single year, according to an analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Total costs from these disasters amounted to $306 billion. That set a new U.S. annual record, beating out 2005, the year of hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Rita.

Since 1980, the United States has sustained 219 weather and climate disasters with costs reaching or exceeding $1 billion each. Collectively, these 219 events have cost the country more $1.5 trillion.

Globally, losses from weather and climate disasters also set a new record in 2017, according to Munich Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurance companies. Insured losses were almost three times higher than the average of $49 billion. The U.S. share of global losses in 2017 was particularly high: half of the global total, as compared to the long-term average of 32 percent.

“For me, a key point is that some of the catastrophic events, such as the series of three extremely damaging hurricanes, or the very severe flooding in South Asia after extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains, are giving us a foretaste of what is to come,” says Torsten Jeworrek, Munich Re Board member responsible for global reinsurance business. Read More

ImaGeo

ImaGeo is a visual blog focusing on the intersection of imagery, imagination and Earth. It focuses on spectacular visuals related to the science of our planet, with an emphasis (although not an exclusive one) on the unfolding Anthropocene Epoch.